Swissair Aerial Photographs

Aerial photography had a special place in the business of the legendary former Swiss airline, Swissair. Walter Mittelholzer (1894–1937), aviation pioneer and one of the founders of Swissair, first trained as a photographer before joining the Swiss army’s flying corps during WW I and later turning to civil aviation because of his keen interest in aerial photography. Photography was also the more profitable part of Ad Astra Aero, one of Swissair’s preceding companies  which continued to exist as a subsidiary of the newly formed Swissair under the name Swissair Photo AG as of 1931 until 2001, when the famous airline ceased operations. Swissair Photo + Vermessung AG (Swissair Photo + Surveying, as it was later named) was saved from liquidation in a buyout in 2001 and still operates as BSF Swissphoto.

The heritage of Walter Mittelholzer and Swissair Photo AG is kept at ETH Zurich’s Image Archive, alongside Swissair’s corporate Swissair Photo Archive (partly published in our book Swissair Souvenirs). The collection comprises around 100,000 pictures taken between 1918 and 2011. In includes mainly vertical and oblique aerial photographs of landscapes, towns and villages, and mountains, but also industrial plants, infrastructures, and individual buildings in Switzerland and abroad, from the 1960s onward in color. About 15,000 of them were taken by Walter Mittelholzer.

A remarkable aspect is the vast number of views of the Swiss mountains: pure landscape photography, many of them with a horizontal or slightly oblique perspective. This was caused by personal interest of the photographers, many of them also keen mountaineers, but probably also by a high demand for such pictures for postcards and other commercial use. During the 1970s there was a notable change, when a more aesthetic view of the land became dominant that rather looked vertically at shapes and colors of the cultivated landscape than at the wilderness.

Around 200 of the most beautiful, most striking, and most informative photographs were selected for the new book Swissair – Aerial Photography. They show the many changes in the landscape and in settlements over nearly a century. They also are an inventory of lost elements making a landscape, such as untamed rivers, orchards, receding glaciers and moors, shrinking agricultural areas, vanished historical buildings. And they document the growth of industrial plants and other infrastructure and urban sprawl in general. The book shows how an idyllic agricultural country has turned into one of the most densely inhabited places in the world in a matter of decades.

The introductory essay looks at the history and content of the collection at the Image Archive at ETH Bibliothek, the history and a range of aspects of aerial photography in general, the changing aesthetics and use of the images and what can be read from them today, technical developments and a brief history of aerial photography in Switzerland.

Series

The series Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the Image Archive, ETH-Bibliothek, published in cooperation by ETH-Bibliothek and Scheidegger & Spiess, aims at building a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. Whereas the library’s online database simplifies research and enables search inquiries going beyond the mere inventory, the books are meant to present the contours of specific collections of images, to embed them in the context of their origin, and to offer an introduction to the multitude of possible historical interpretations.

Each volume of the series comprises an introductory essay on the given subject and presented material. Detailed captions offer additional information on individual images. This subject-guided approach and carefully selected examples are meant to give a representative view of the—sometimes extensive—range of a particular collection within the Image Archive. The entire series is conceived for a general audience interested in cultural history and visual aesthetics, rather than for a specialized and scientifically interested one.